Disruptive technology : Samsung 250gb laptop SSD | Hacker News Reader

Disruptive technology : Samsung 250gb laptop SSD

news.yahoo.com

5 pointsmarketer7 comments

How is this disruptive? Is it significantly cheaper than expected? The capacity is larger than before, but it feels like an incremental improvement to me.

Yes, this Yahoo/AFP blurb story is weak. But we can look at some of the other coverage...

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/05/25/samsung.256gb....

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8904

..and see that:

(1) It's double the size of the previous largest Samsung offering, and will be the largest SSD available.

(2) It's faster than previous offerings.

(3) It's the thinnest such drive with a SATA II interface.

(4) It uses a cheaper manufacturing process, though the impact on final cost isn't yet announced.

So incremental, yes, but a fairly large increment.

More interesting than any single company announcement, though, is how this reinforces an industrywide trend of SSD improvement and adoption. A lot more laptops will have SSD drives... but also many servers, as a performance boost, and because SSDs have different random-access characteristics than spinning drives it will affect the optimal architecture of server-based apps.

The latest Samsung SSD on the market now (128GB) was reviewed by c't magazine recently and it already beats 2.5" HDDs by a decent margin, coming close to 3.5" HDD SATA transfer rates and trouncing even SAS HDDs for seek times. Of course, it costs about a gazillion times more...

Samsung may have a lead since they make their own flash chips, but I expect other vendors to be only a month or two behind them.

I think it is disruptive in the sense that the cost/utility for SSD are soon going to cross with regular hard drives.

Something like 90% of disk drive manufacturers failed the transition from floppy disks to the 3.5", and it feels incremental too.

Samsung said its 256-gigabyte solid state drive (SSD) for data storage is 2.4 times faster than traditional hard drives.

To me this just emphasizes how advanced traditional HDDs are. I would've expected a bigger increase in speed.

Then again, I'm not sure how significant a single number is (random access, small files, large files, seek time...)

The story is probably copied directly from a press release.

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